


For All of Our Mistakes

by endlesshorizons



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: 1960s, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-30
Updated: 2015-05-30
Packaged: 2018-04-01 23:16:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4038301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesshorizons/pseuds/endlesshorizons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world without powers and fellow mutants to fight for, everything is different -- and also exactly the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For All of Our Mistakes

For a moment, Charles can only stare. To Charles, Erik’s figure has become a ghost in the past three years, faded and airbrushed over with his own regret and longing, his sharp outline smoothed over with the passage of time like water over a wet painting. It takes a long moment for it to register that this real, concrete person of lines and edges is Erik.

At least, Erik seems to be having a similar experience. There is a moment when neither of them seem to know what to say.

“Who is it, Erik?” Suddenly, Irene’s voice sounds again and Charles jolts out of his daze to see the woman walk out behind Erik, eyes blank but nonetheless facing their general direction. It takes the sight of her for the strangeness of the meeting to finally catch up to him.

“What are you doing here?” He blurts out.

 

\---

 

“Come stay with me,” Charles says as they stand on the lonely beach, the body of Sebastian Shaw lying before them with a single bullet through his forehead and Moira behind them speaking into her radio. Beside him, Erik is shaking and Charles hears the soft thud of his gun hitting the sand. Charles resists the urge to pull him into his arms with Moira and her partner still standing behind them, and only stands closer so that Erik can lean unsteadily on his side.

For long moments, Erik doesn’t speak, and the only sound is Moira’s murmuring above the splashing of the waves, firm and unyielding as she states her assessment.  As the silence stretches on, Charles feels bubbles of panic escaping as he thinks back to the previous days and nights, wondering if he is expecting too much, if he has presumed too much. But then Erik answers, the words of his agreement soft in his ear for the tidal wave that it sends through Charles, keeping him afloat as they wait for rescue.

That night, Charles returns to his apartment in the city for the first time in weeks since Moira had shown up at his office with requests for him to sort through the unintelligible papers of a Nazi geneticist. It takes a while for Charles to come to terms with the fact that the sweet, unassuming girl that he had briefly dated in undergrad — the first of many young men and women — now works with the CIA, but Charles eventually agrees to help. Needless to say, he ends up doing a lot more than sifting through biology jargon and brings home more than the insignificant cheque for his services.

Erik, who Charles has never seen bat an eye at the sight of opulence while on the mission, startles at the attendant footman at the building’s door and the details on the beams of Charles’ suite, cluttered with armchairs and dark-wooded furniture scrounged from the rooms of the now-empty estate in Westchester. Charles ushers him in and into the shower, busying himself with finding the softest towels and changing the dusty sheets. That night, in the calm of the dim moonlight, Erik’s his arms and legs fall in tangles into the spaces between Charles’ limbs, his eyes weary and body limp as if he had shot a bullet through his own skull rather than that of the man he had been hunting for over a decade.

 

Looking back, Charles thinks that he should have known better. He _knows_ that he should have known better. But those first few days, as they recuperated from the strains of the previous weeks while taking walks through the city and rediscovering Charles’ favorite haunts, Charles sees Erik’s relaxed shoulders and wandering gait and feels only happiness and a glowing relief. He admires Erik’s neat lines in the shadows of budding greenery in Central Park, sees his soft, toothless smiles as they pass through the roaring colors of concerts and festivals, and wonders how the city could ever have thrived without Erik’s spirit in its midst. How, without his presence, the city had found the energy to plunge forward from day to night to day again. It seems impossible, now, that only a few weeks ago he had walked through the streets unawares, while Erik had been leapfrogging between airplanes and ships as he crisscrossed the world. This, he thinks with conviction, is where he belongs, where they both belong, and surely the world must break apart if this push and pull between them were to be anything less than incandescent.

The man beside him is not the man he had first pulled out of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, who had been coiled tight and focused, who had accepted Charles’ friendship and his touches over expensive scotch and warm hotel lights but let it all slide off in the mornings, rising out of the body-scorched sheets untouched as Charles struggled not to let his own flushes be seen by the CIA personnel. That man had looked Charles dead in the eyes and proclaimed his plans for murder, letting Charles know without speaking the words that he is willing to offer up himself and Charles and more for this vengeance that ran through his veins instead of blood.

Except now Sebastian Shaw is dead and they are both here, alive, without severe injury or possibly even a permanent scar. Erik had faced his childhood nightmare and had his say while the other man stood helpless, had fired a bullet between his eyes mirroring the hole Shaw had put in the long-buried body of Erik’s mother the day before the Americans came, even after the months Erik had spent enduring his cuts and answering his questions without complaint. Now, Charles thinks, this is the boy who has finally been set free, who has finally stepped up from the experimenting table and can only now begin to live a life outside of the metal fences.

 

Erik checks the doors and windows every time they return home. Charles had barely noticed it before; on the missions, it had always been part of one of those security procedures that Charles knew nothing about and didn’t feel it within his responsibility to learn, happy to leave them to those who did this for a living.

Charles does, however, know about habit, being a creature of it himself. So Charles acquiesces to the security checks, waiting for the day when they become obsolete. When he returns home from work one day, he finds Erik changing the locks on the front door and the windows. He takes the new key Erik hands him and replaces the old one on his key chain, forgetting about it until the doorman stops him in the lobby a few weeks later and reminds him that the building manager needs a key of each suite to conduct annual checkups.

 

Charles tells his doorman and neighbors as well as the few friends from the university that he has introduced Erik to that he is a cousin new to the city who will be living with Charles for the foreseeable future, since he has the room after his sister moved out. Erik doesn’t make an effort to get to know any of them, but he is a solitary person by nature and Charles isn’t too concerned.

Charles is nervous when he invites Raven to dinner. With Raven, at least, they don’t have to hide, but their relationship is more volatile than a paint factory and he doesn’t want to scare Erik off. But Raven is his sister and as always, he reassures himself with the easy laughter of their childhood and gives her a call.

Somewhere between their idyllic childhood and the day he returned home to find the apartment empty of any sign of his sister’s presence, their conversations began to splinter and crack along lines that always seem clearer to his sister than to him. When Charles had tracked her down again, she was living in a rundown building with five others, the grimy window showing the long-haired men and short-haired women passing outside, impervious to Charles’ requests to return home. Raven’s motivations are elusive to him, leaving Charles grasping at threads as he tries to predict her thoughts and reactions, something he is able to do easily with most other people. Charles can’t help the concerned murmurs and queries when Raven talks about her circle of friends, her unstable waitressing job and the apartment she now shares with Irene, and Raven doesn’t hide her scorn at the way that Charles lives and the things he preaches.

So he is relieved when, after minimal pleading, she agrees to come to the apartment to meet him and Erik. He desperately wants Raven and Erik to get along, but doesn’t hold out much hope and warns Erik of such.

Raven greets Charles with a hug and leans down to give him a peck on the cheek. When Erik is introduced to her, Raven gives him a wide grin and directs an exaggerated, suggestive wink at Charles. “Caught yourself a good one this time, Charles,” she says and Charles laughs, trying to let out his nervous energy.

She turns to Erik. “What’s that accent I hear?”

Erik shrugs. “All over the place,” he says evasively.

“Mysterious, are we? You seem more interesting than any of Charles’ other ‘friends’,” she says, looking at the taller man beneath the bangs of her closely-cropped hair.

Charles opens his mouth to intervene, but this is when Erik speaks. “German. But I spent a few years in Ireland after the camps.”

 

“Shh, it’s all right,” Charles whispers, eyes still blurring and sticky from slumber.

Erik’s fist clenches tightly in his shirt for a moment before they relax, releasing their twisted up energy.

“There we go,” Charles croons, running a hand down Erik’s spine until his rabbit-quick breathing evens out. “It’s just a dream, it's not real." Charles continues to hum softly in Erik's ear. "It’s in the past, it can’t hurt you now. It doesn't matter anymore."

The next morning, Erik is up early making breakfast when Charles wakes, saying nothing about the previous night and flipping pancakes with a determination that makes Charles’ chest lift with pride.

 

Charles brings home Chinese takeout. Charles brings home bags of groceries and toilet paper. He brings home a flyer from the local synagogue.

Erik stops staring at the television for long enough to take it in. Charles smiles wanly, unsure of his reaction, but Erik turns to look at Charles and stands, pulling him into his arms and burrowing his nose in the crook of his neck. Then, he kisses Charles so hard that Charles forgets the rest of the tentative words he had prepared. As Erik pushes into him long into the night, Charles marvels at the intensity of the man in front of him, wondering how the world had created something so beautiful.

To Charles’ surprise, it’s the booklet he picks up from a nearby technical college that causes Erik to snap. From the beginning, he had known that Erik had a temper, had observed it from his biting remarks at startled CIA agents and the bursts of impulsiveness in his usually calculated meticulousness. It had not made an appearance since Erik had returned to the city with him, however, and Charles had been pleased to see its absence as another sign of this new Erik who walked without that lumbering, ever-present weight on his shoulders.

Recently, Charles had noticed the growing restlessness in the other man. He sits still and silent, but Charles can see it trembling in the unmoving line of his arms and the unblinking gaze of his eyes.

“I know you can do more,” he says, “but you don’t have a high school diploma and you have to start somewhere.” He thinks back to the lengthy conversation he had with the recruitment officer, skirting around the specifics of Erik’s “special circumstances.”

But Erik sees the large printed letters and smiling, industrious young men on the cover and jumps up from his perch on the sofa.

“Why don’t you go on and say it, then?” He snarls, taking Charles completely off guard. “I’m useless, I’m doing nothing and just living off your money.”

Charles pulls back at the vicious look on Erik’s face. His shock prevents him from knowing what to feel and how to react, whether he should be angry himself or be hurt at Erik’s tone and implications. “That’s not what I said,” is the only thing that he ends up saying.

“No, but that’s what you’ve been thinking all this time, isn’t it? That this isn’t what you signed up for?” Erik gestures at himself, at the air around them as if it contains something other than the slightly coffee-scented air that Charles breathes.

“What are you talking about?” Charles asks, flabbergasted.

Erik laughs then, an ugly, ugly laugh, more poisonous than Shaw’s condescending chuckle had been when he had first laid eyes on the two of them, confident in the safety of his submarine sanctuary all the way until it started to fall apart around him.

 

\---

 

Erik leans against the wall, pulling open the adjacent window by a crack to tap off the ash of his cigarette on the windowsill. He stares at the dirty flecks of dark on the impeccable white surface before reaching out a hand to sweep them off and compulsively pull the window closed again. It is pointless, he knows, illogical to pull the pane of glass open and closed again. He should just leave it open. Charles would bring over an ashtray.

Raven watches him for a while then moves to settle at his side, reaching over to pluck out a cigarette for herself from his pack. The two of them stand in silence for a while, as they wait for Charles to return from his run to the corner store.

“I’m not actually related to Charles, you know,” she says after a while, seemingly out of the blue. “I was living on the streets before he found me.”

“I know,” Erik replies, “Charles told me.”

Raven glances up briefly with narrowed eyes. “It wasn’t his story to tell.”

Erik looks over at the blonde girl beside him, really looks. She is pretty with chin-length hair, slouching casually against the window in her blouse and boyish pants and an incongruently serious expression, radiating an entirely different kind of confidence than her brother’s. “No, I suppose not,” Erik says.

“For all his smarts and fancy degrees, there are some things that Charles can’t understand.” She takes another drag from her cigarette, letting the smoke out in a slow, steady stream. “People like us, for example.”

“But he tries,” Erik says, but it comes out not exactly like the statement he intends.

“I’m not sure that he does.” She pauses. “I think he tries very hard to fit everything into his own ideas of what the world is.”

Erik considers this, watches the twin wisps of smoke rise from the tips of their cigarettes. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying,” Raven says with a look far more scrutinizing than any Charles had aimed at him, “that you have to do what is right for you.”

Erik turns to her in surprise. “He’s your brother. Aren’t you doing this wrong?”

“Yes, he is my brother, but he isn’t the only one who needs family. Charles will be fine, trust me,” she says, looking at him with a gaze that is steady, sympathetic and simple in its honesty. It makes something cold settle in Erik’s stomach.

“I see.”

 

\---

 

Scars are an incredible phenomenon, another of the many marvels of the human body. An army of microscopic cells, a cascade of tiny occurrences that add together to turn gaping crimson wounds into ridges of white, healed flesh. It is fascinating how some injuries heal perfectly while others, however small they may first appear, keep their marks for years and lifetimes to come.

Erik’s skin is a constellation of scars, Charles remembers vividly. He remembers running his fingers and lips and tongue over them, tracing the lines on Erik’s body where he had been cut open and put together again. One night, a few months after they returned from Cuba, Charles had spent hours cataloging every one of them, given each and every one the love he felt for the man who possessed them. Erik had gasped and grabbed at Charles and buried his nose in his hair, clutching at him as though he couldn’t find it in himself to ever let him go.

The next morning, after knocking and waiting at the door of the bathroom for ten minutes without a reply, Charles had shouldered his way inside. He found Erik standing under the spray of a shower long since gone cold, scrubbing furiously at the lines and ridges on his skin.

 

“Why does everyone leave me?” Charles asks with hazy eyes, reaching up to take a strand of Raven’s hair between his fingers.

“They don’t,” Raven says, slurring slightly in her own drunken state, “you’ve broken up with plenty of people. Most of them, in fact.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Charles says, a sob catching in his throat. “Why does everyone I love leave me? Why did you leave me?”

 

The night after Erik leaves, Raven arrives at Charles’ apartment with two bottles of expensive wine. They are the only things she consents to spending her inheritance money on — what Sharon hadn’t managed to drink away, at least — while they joke about the irony. It has been something of a tradition for the past ten years, when the two of them are on amicable terms, the many bottles of wine coming and going with the lovers in Charles’ life, their beautiful empty bottles sitting briefly in the corner of Charles’ kitchen before being collected and forgotten.

Raven has dinner with Charles for two weeks, bearing a different obnoxious concoction every night. Charles doesn’t take the opportunity to make a dig at his mother’s old habits. By the third week, an uneasiness has settled into Raven’s expression as she watches Charles’ huddled form on the sofa.

“Charles,” she begins hesitantly, fingers running through the too-long strands of his hair. “About Erik… he isn’t like the others, is he?”

“No,” Charles answers softly, almost too quietly to be heard, feeling words stick like glass in the splintered beams of his throat.

“Oh,” she says, and something in her voice, some true devastated grief, makes him look up. “I am so sorry.” She looks stricken, almost as much as Charles feels, and he grasps both her hands in his.

“Don’t be, it’s not like it’s your fault. Karma, I suppose. You told me I would get burned one day.” Charles laughs, trying for joking but even he can tell it sounds bitter.

Raven pulls him in, closer than she had for years, like when they were children and she had gotten lost on an outing or broken an ankle. “But not like this,” she whispers, “not like this.”

 

\---

 

Charles knocks on the door of the apartment, waiting for a reply and nodding at Sean, a boy with wild, brilliant red hair who is leaving his own apartment down the grayish hall. Sean is a good friend of Raven’s, he knows, having met him at Raven’s birthday party at her favorite pub the previous month, and part of a band whose music Charles finds a little overwhelming but takes the others’ word as good. He is supposed to be meeting Raven later today at a cafe down the road, but he had finished his lab session early and knows that she has Thursday afternoons free.

“Can you get that?” He hears Irene yell from inside the apartment and smiles. The door cracks and Charles waits for Raven’s familiar face to appear. When the door swings open a second later, however, it isn’t Raven who stands before him.

For a moment, Charles can only stare. To Charles, Erik’s figure has become a ghost in the past three years, faded and airbrushed over with his own regret and longing, his sharp outline smoothed over with the passage of time like water over a wet painting. It takes a long moment for it to register that this real, concrete person of lines and edges is Erik.

At least, Erik seems to be having a similar experience. There is a moment when neither of them seem to know what to say.

“Who is it, Erik?” Suddenly, Irene’s voice sounds again and Charles jolts out of his daze to see the woman walk out behind Erik, eyes blank but nonetheless facing their general direction. It takes the sight of her for the strangeness of the meeting to finally catch up to him.

“What are you doing here?” He blurts out.

“I asked him over to take a look at the wiring.” Raven steps up to him from behind. Her head is held high and her eyes meet his defiantly, but her bottom lip is red where it is caught between her teeth.

The reality of betrayal crashes over him all at once. Charles remembers empty nights and empty days, remembers lonely walks through the city and knocking on Raven’s door at two in the morning. He wants to yell and break the apartment building to its tottering wooden bones. He remembers Erik’s listless stillness in front of the static of the television screen and Raven’s anger as she stopped him talking with a slammed door. A strangled sound leaves his throat, while Erik watches with his electrician’s toolbox, the new lines at the corner of his eyes and the diminishing ridges between his brows.

Charles opens his mouth, but this time he has no idea what he wants to say, whether he wants to scream in fury or break down and beg. The three of them stand at the door, looking at each other with parted lips and no words spoken in the air between them.

There is everything to apologize for, and there is nothing to apologize for.

**Author's Note:**

> So...this is the first thing I've finished in the past 6 months? Oops. But now that exams are over and I'm not planning to work this summer, I'll have more time to write - not that that's an excuse, of course, with the amount of fic I read.
> 
> Should be more Cherik & Johnlock coming!


End file.
